WASHINGTON – President Trump has signed an executive order to ban transactions with eight Chinese connected apps, including the Alipay payment platform owned by Chinese billionaire Jack Ma’s Ant Group Co.
The order also bans transactions with the WeChat Pay app owned by Chinese technology giant Tencent Holdings Ltd., along with six other apps.
The order, which was signed Tuesday, will take effect within 45 days of Mr Trump leaving office. It orders Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross to evaluate other apps that may pose a threat to national security, and calls on the Secretary of Commerce, Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence to issue a report with recommendations for transferring data from US users to foreign opponents.
Mr. Trump, in order, said the apps can access private information of their users. That information could be used by the Chinese government to “track the locations of federal employees and contractors and build records of personal information,” Mr. Trump said.
Alipay, a payment and lifestyle app with more than 1 billion users, is owned by Ant Group, the Chinese financial technology giant controlled by Mr. Ma. A representative for Ant had no immediate comment. A WeChat representative did not immediately comment either.
The new move comes after the Trump administration issued a few executive orders in August to impose new limits on Chinese social media apps TikTok and WeChat, citing national security concerns. Both orders have faced legal challenges.
The order to ban downloads of WeChat from Tencent was blocked by a federal judge in September, shortly before it was due to take effect.
The Trump administration has tried to overturn the ruling. WeChat is a competitor of Alipay.
US companies doing business with China expressed concerns about the possible scope of WeChat’s executive decision, arguing that it could make them less competitive there. US companies could express similar concerns about the new order.
Two federal judges have also separately blocked the Trump administration’s TikTok ban. The ban would have restricted US companies from conducting transactions with TikTok, including hosting the company’s data and delivering the company’s content, essentially rendering the app useless in the US.
In issuing an executive order calling on TikTok to be effectively closed or sold to a US company, the administration said it feared that TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance Ltd. information about US users could be shared with the Chinese government, which the company said it would never do. To do.
The Trump administration has also tried to get China-based telecommunications companies such as Huawei Technologies Co. to be limited by means of implementing decrees. Those actions aimed at securing US networks, but also seemed to undermine the competitiveness of Chinese companies around the world as the next generation of wireless 5G services becomes available.
Write to Andrew Restuccia at [email protected] and John D. McKinnon at [email protected]
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